Carroll Publishes Wonderland One Day at a Time

Posted on by Rachel Eley

Perhaps unique in the annals of Alice publishing, syndicated columnist Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle is publishing the text of Wonderland one sentence at a time at the end of his column, beginning on July 25 in one titled “Turning on to rainbows, and tuning out.” He had just finished publishing King Lear this same way. Inspiration perhaps came from a similar stunt in the New Yorker, whose editor, Gardner Botsford, got bored with seeing the same capsule review for The Fantastics, which ran for 42 years. In its place, beginning on November 23, 1968, with the copyright—or, one could argue, December 21 with the opening line—it began serializing the first chapter of Ulysses, ending in November of 1971.

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2 thoughts on “Carroll Publishes Wonderland One Day at a Time”

  1. I advise your readers to take a look at http://www.jabberwocky.com/
    It is incredible to see how a fan of Carrol can find endless (“geek’, he says) humor and entertainment in just a poem –Jabberwocky. It proves once more the enticing and at times unintended magic of Carroll’s work. David Shaw, the owner of this website wrote:
    “One of the heights of geek humor ever since Digital put their Altavista Babelfish translation service online, is to feed text to the computer translator, translate it into a foreign language, and then translate it back. Here is a stanza of Jabberwocky, translated into German, and then translated back to English:

    `Beware Jabberwock, my son! The Kiefer, which beien, the grip arms, which intercept! Watch out the bird Jubjub, and avoid you frumious the Bandersnatch! ‘, he took its vorpal to blade into the hand: Long time manxomefeind, which it looked up — in such a way stood still it by the tree Tumtum, and confessed one while in the thought.

    Keith Lim’s “the jabberwocky variations” is a really neat collection of Jabberwocky translations. Have you ever wondered what Jabberwocky would look like in Latin (Hora aderat briligi. Nunc et Slythia Tova….)? Look no further.

    Keith doesn’t have it yet, but my cousin Dani, my friend Yah-el, and I, got together to do Jabberwocky in Hebrew.[…]”
    http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/jabber/

    Shaw is right –automated translation tends to render funny results.

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